I am a MA/MBA candidate at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School of Business. I focus on Russian politics, economics, and demography but also write more generally about Eastern Europe. Please note that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and that I do not speak in an official capacity for Lauder, Wharton, Forbes or any other organization.
I do my best to inject hard numbers (and flashy Excel charts) into conversations and debates that are too frequently driven by anecdotes. In addition to Forbes I've written for True/Slant, INOSMI, Salon, the National Interest, The Moscow Times, Russia Magazine, the Washington Post, and Quartz.
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I encourage everyone to read the article in full, it’s not particularly long and it covers the relevant issues quite well, but I did want to highlight a few paragraphs because they say quite a lot about the 2012 presidential election and the vanishingly small foreign policy differences between Obama and Romney:

The Romney campaign has been critical of Mr. Obama’s record and positions on a variety of national security issues, including containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and confronting China’s rise. But many of the positions taken by Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have either been vague or not fundamentally different from those of the administration.

Russia, however, is an exception, one where Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has carved out a clear contrast to Mr. Obama, who came to office promising to “reset” relations with Moscow, only to find that Russia can be a difficult partner…

Some advisers close to Mr. Romney, who declined to be quoted or identified by name, say Russia is a good illustration of his belief that national security threats are closely tied to economic power — in this case stemming from Russia’s oil and gas reserves, which it has used to muscle European countries dependent on energy imports.

They also cite his tendency to view foreign policy conflicts as zero-sum negotiations. Mr. Romney, an accomplished deal-maker at Bain Capital, views his negotiating skills as an advantage he holds over Mr. Obama…

Mr. Romney also criticized a White House decision scrapping a proposed antiballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe and building in its place a reconfigured system to shoot down short- and medium-range Iranian missiles. Mr. Romney argued that Mr. Obama had caved to Russian pressure, trading away a crucial program with little in return. Administration officials say their reconfigured system offers better protection for American allies.

I wanted to start off by noting that I am genuinely confused as to why this article was released today. Using arcane and obscure tactics such as “going to Mitt Romney’s website and reading his Russia platform” and “Google searching his statements on the START treaty,” I was able to produce a broadly similar analysis back in January. I’m not complaining that the story was written, as should be clear from the paragraphs I pasted above it’s an extremely valuable, I am just honestly curious as to why it was written in mid-May instead of mid-April, mid-March, or mid-February. As near as I can tell Romney has been incredibly consistent in his statements on Russia, so it’s not as if there’s some sudden change in policy that needs to be analyzed.

Moving right along, the idea that Romney’s dealings in the business world will in any way prepare him to deal with the Russians is an extremely strange one** (I could use other adjectives to describe it, but I’m trying to stay polite). Vladimir Putin isn’t some chubby, balding corporate executive from flyover country, the sorts of people over whom Mitt Romney is used to running roughshod in his business dealings, he’s someone who’s been at the highest levels of state power for more than a decade, someone who knows how the game is played.

Putin is not going to be won over with PowerPoint presentations about “synergy,” he won’t be impressed to hear someone use the word “leverage” in every sentence, and he can’t simply be “bought out” as would often happen in Bain-style hostile takeovers. If your plan to extract concessions from Vladimir Putin is “aggressively bluster in the hope that he caves” you’re going to be extremely disappointed. Moreover the entire Russian diplomatic corps is basically opposed to zero-sum deals as a matter of principle. The Russians, and this is not a personal characteristic of Vladimir Putin but something that characterized Russian/Soviet diplomacy for decades, never give up something for nothing. If Romney views the United States-Russia relationship as something he can “win,” then he is guaranteed to fail.

The article also briefly outlines Romney’s very strange belief that Russia is somehow on pace to become an economic hegemon. Indeed the extent to which Romney’s beliefs differ from those of Leon Aron, his Chief Russia adviser, is scarcely believable and, frankly, more than a little bit alarming. I don’t think a political campaign needs to have everyone in ideological lockstep, but Aron and Romney aren’t even marching in the same direction. Aron thinks that the far more serious danger facing the US is of a weakened and disintegrating Russia, while Romney thinks they are a “rising power” whose military and economic power pose a direct threat to American national security. Romney and Aron are not simply “not on the same page,” they’re not reading from the same book. Hell, they’re not even reading books in the same language.

But apart from Romney’s unique foibles concerning Russia, which I’ve covered before and will cover again, I wanted to focus on the last paragraph I cited above because it is as handy a summation of the corrupted state of American foreign policy as you’re likely to see. To avoid turning into a partyarchy , a stale and perverted form of democracy in which elections are held and parties alternate in power but there is never a meaningful change in policy, a country should have at least two parties that have essentially dissimilar views: a party in favor of greater economic liberalization, and a party that is in favor of greater state intervention, a party in favor of an aggressive military posture, and a party that strongly favors diplomacy and so on and so on.

But as that paragraph makes clear, there is no such distinction in America right now. The “dovish” president doesn’t argue against the idea of ABM, a position which until recently was held purely by conservative Republicans, indeed he is fully and aggressively in favor of it and has been willing to sacrifice the effectiveness of “the reset” at its altar. The only differences between Barack Obama‘s view of missile defense and Mitt Romney’s view of missile defense are tactical in nature. They both agree that America needs ABM to defend itself from non-existent Iranian missiles carrying non-existent Iranian nuclear warheads, they just have some quibbles about where exactly to put the interceptors and how much the Russians should be antagonized in the process of doing so. To put it succinctly: when Barack Obama’s position on missile defense, which in the 1980′s would have put him in Reagan’s camp, is the farthest “left” that a mainstream politician is allowed to go, something is very badly amiss.

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Romney’s Magic Mormon Underwear protects him from the evils of the world including socialism, homosexuality and taxes on his inherited wealth. Can these sacred garments also make it rain down enough cash for a victory in the race since well over 90% of public offices are bought in our country? Drop by to discuss tighty whites and the role of money in politics at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/05/mitt-romneys-magic-mormon-underwear.html

The trend in Representative Democracy ,everywhere, is for a surface distinguished by style disputes and a basis of ideological identity. A process emerges of policy continuity in which only the source of indistinguishable banalities differ. Whether Obama or Romney is elected the impoverishment of broad sections of the US workforce will continue. The proportion of the working poor will be the same in the US and Germany. Similarly the construction of missile defence sites in Europe will continue under either and build to a very big political crisis there when the Russian response is deployed.

The “dovish” president doesn’t argue against the idea of ABM, a position which until recently was held purely by conservative Republicans, indeed he is fully and aggressively in favor of it and has been willing to sacrifice the effectiveness of “the reset” at its alter*.

No one actually listens to Rmoney’s excessively strange efforts to sound, or even to appear, to be from this planet . The only real concern for 35-40% of the population is whether or not he’s white enough and xtian (sorry, I know the cross is not an acceptable Mormon icon) enough.

Let me see, the polls say that if the election was held solely on foreign policy then Obama would win in a landslide. And you think there should be daylight between the two candidates? Also I like the idea that a camp has people with competing ideas, that they do not read the same books. Maybe that comes from business experience – having everyone in the shop of like mind is a recipe for failure. (That is different from overall focus on what is important.) The remarks about what business people look like that Romney has dealt with, as opposed to the lean and mean Putin, make the writer look foolish.

Negotiating skills? Not much room to elaborate here, but two of the principles are the same in either arena: 1) meticulous preparation, to understand the people you are dealing with as well as what is most important to them 2) clear idea of what is most important to you.

I don’t see anything in the author’s claim that somehow “negotiating experience in business” is worthless in international negotiating. The one item that may be added is that in business negotiations you usually do not know much about the private lives of those you are negotiating with. In the diplomatic arena it is quite different, you want confident negotiators on your side who do not have blatant personal weaknesses such as sharing a mistress with a gangster or real problems with the bottle, because you can bet the opposition will know about it and it will show in the respect or lack of respect they give and the confidence they have.

and you think that Adomanis knew something about Russia:) Adomanis is an amateur. Latest about Putin Russia, Putin signed new for.policy document. And of course , Romney was right !!!:) http://regnum.ru/news/fd-abroad/estonia/1528564.html